Girls Are Rad: Ora Cogan
Ora Cogan continues to make Vancouver look good with The Quarry
And, folks, if you’ll look to your left, we have Ora Cogan, another transplant in the Vancouver scene. The daughter of a folk singer and a photo-journalist who left Israel following the Yom Kippur War, Cogan grew up in British Columbia surrounded by music and art and began writing her own songs at 12, advancing on to teach herself guitar, violin, piano, and dulcimer. Drawing on the American musical styles of the time and more traditional Middle Eastern influences, Cogan soon crafted a distinctive style to suit her youth and, at 17, went to Israel to live with her grandmother. But she soon left for Athens and other European cities, where she spent a year writing and performing songs on the streets and in pubs that would land on her first album, Sparrow (2005).
After returning to Vancouver, Cogan co-founded two radically different groups: Her Jazz Noise Collective, an experimental, trans-inclusive music network for women that encourages females to play more noise and experimental music, and Cornerstone, an a capella gospel quartet (not to be confused with the metal group of the same name—isn’t there always a metal group with the same name?). She is still affiliated with Her Jazz Noise Collective, which puts on semi-annual “Women’s Studies” that feature female artists, many of them debuts, and welcomes Cogan as part of the performance series.
Next up came Tatter (2007), a melodic nod toward traditional folk, which Cogan recorded and toured Canada behind with the down-home, finger-pickin’ help of The Be Good Tanyas. Tatter also featured a cover of “Motherless Child,” which was recently included on the compilation Beautiful Star: The Songs of Odetta. Expanding the Tatter tour to all of North America, Cogan also toured with Tanya Tagaq and Vashti Bunyan (stopping to play a few festivals in Canada and the Pacific Northwest along the way) before recording 2008’s Harbouring on Borne Recordings and touring Europe. Cogan’s upcoming release is entitled The Quarry and steps slightly away from the traditional sound she’s focused on in her past releases to incorporate more experimentation and some lo-fi fuzz.
Posted by Leah Urbom on Dec 31, 2009 @ 9:05 am